X3: Better than XXX, but only just

I caught the midnight showing of X3 last night.  Why did I do such a thing, when I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to be good?  I’m unemployed, what else do I have to do?  Plus I get to watch all the freaks who show up to midnight showings.  And sure enough, they came out in full force.  The theater was packed, primarily with teenage boys.  There were a few hapless girlfriends and older types there, but the high school lot definitely made up the vast majority.  People would start clapping in unison fifteen minutes before the show started, evidently trying to peer pressure the projectionist into starting the movie early.  This didn’t work so they started doing the wave.  Eventually they tired of this and started screaming the answer to the movie theater trivia, screaming even louder every time when they got it right.  The only act I found truly amusing was when they started making the Colossus sound effect from the 80’s video game.  It was moderately embarrassing that I would recognize this extremely obscure reference, but I do know quite a bit about X-Men.  Hopefully I’m one day on Jeopardy and X-Men is a category so I can justify learning all this trivia in my youth.

As predicted the movie wasn’t very good.  It wasn’t bad per se, but I certainly wouldn’t describe it as good.  The script, director and casting problems I’ve been reading about for the last two years were evident on the screen.  The dialogue was overdramatic and cliché.  Admittedly it made it sound like a comic book, but not a good one.  One that you read when you were ten and thought was awesome, but doesn’t hold up when you read it as an adult.  I suspect I would’ve thought the movie was awesome a decade ago, but at this age the plot holes drove me crazy.  There were quite a few “Why in the world did they do that?” moments scattered throughout the movie.  I was never surprised by supposed plot-twists or shocking moments, but I have seen a ton of movies and read far too many comics.    

The effects were mostly quite good.  I disagreed with using Beast and Angel in the movie and sure enough, their effects were the weakest.  I had applauded the inclusion of Colossus, and he was decent.  Juggernaut was better than I thought he’d be, but still wasn’t fantastic.  But with thirty years of X-Men history to pull from, I don’t understand why they made up new characters for this movie when they could easily have pulled from the mythos.  And although I’m fine with them altering story elements to fit the movie format, they made many changes that I felt detracted rather than added to the story.  

So it was ok.  It’s got some good action and effects.  It’s an effective conclusion to the previous two movies which were significantly better.  I think this should be the end of it, but the last scene before the credits most definitely is a desperate plea for X4.  Being the nerdish fanboys we are, a large portion of the audience had heard about the bonus scene after the credits.  Unfortunately the projectionist didn’t know about it, so turned off the film before it came on.  That was quite irritating.  So I had to scour the internet to discover the last scene, and it too points to X4.  So make sure you don’t have an idiot projectionist and stay for the coda.